Sunday, August 30, 2009

The hour is nigh.

The end of the fossil-fuel era, the fragility of the global food web, growing population density, and the spread of pandemics, as well as the emergence of radically transformative bio- and nano­technologies -- each of these threatens us with broad disruption or even devastation. And as good as our brains have become at planning ahead, we're still biased toward looking for near-term, simple threats. Subtle, long-term risks, particularly those involving complex, global processes, remain devilishly hard for us to manage.

But here's an optimistic scenario for you: if the next several decades are as bad as some of us fear they could be, we can respond, and survive, the way our species has done time and again: by getting smarter. But this time, we don't have to rely solely on natural evolutionary processes to boost our intelligence. We can do it ourselves.

23 comments:

Anonymous
said...

Ah, Cascio. I read the article. He's been drinking the Kurzweilian kool-aid again. Or taking too much modafinil.

I found this to be a rather shallow, disappointing article that ignores the real world, and presents a kind of absurdly fundamentalist transhumanist belief paradigm or impractical ideology that has vanishingly little relevance to actual reality.

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